VAGOSCRIBE

Addis Ababa means “new flower.”

“Flasher” is someone who exposes his/her genitalia in public.

We’re walking back from lunch and we notice a man pulling up the cloth that is wrapped around his legs, like a skirt/wrap, which is common rural attire that men who have come to the city still wear around town.  We make eye contact.  He hikes the cloth up far enough to reveal his green underwear.  No scratching was occurring. 

Next thing you know, he pulls out his goods.  We’re maybe twenty feet away. 

He’s probably in his 50s, disheveled, with a cane, likely living on the street.  Walks a little bent.

We walk around him, and he says something.  We continue on.

“That’s a first.”

“Did he really do that?”

“Yep.”

Taken aback, chuckling a bit, but also thinking about what he might do to street children, we continue on to our office. 

“Get this.  A man on the street revealed himself to us?”

Our secretary doesn’t quite get the translation.  So we make some motions.  She laughs!

“Has that ever happened to you?”

“Not me, but I saw it happen to people in front of me one time.  You know what?  I’ve seen men…”

She then makes motions in a way that is quickly deduced to…

“…completely naked?”

“Yeah!  Walking down the street.  I’ve seen it many times.”

“Really?!  If you do that in the U.S., you get put in jail.”

“Why?  What if they’re crazy?”

“They have to be a little crazy to do that!  And if they’re very crazy they get put into a hospital for crazy people.”

“Really?”

“Yep.”

The day continued on.  We had tea and coffee and wrote our reports and fixed up some posters.  Then the afternoon rains came and cooled things down.

Across from the big, new, Ethiopian Orthodox Church as you’re walking along Cameroon Street away from the airport, is a stately new residential compound.  Word is that the second wealthiest man in Ethiopia owns the property. 

The parents’ home is as opulent as anything you’d see in Richville, USA, complete with a hanging chandelier on the one balcony and big open windows so passers-by can see the fine furniture not intended to be sat on and art on the walls.  What’s more, Dad provided homes for each of his children, four smaller versions, though still several thousand square feet in size, of comfort beyond necessity fall in line along the road. 

Video cameras scan the street, guards sit inside little office-like posts by the ornate gates that open to the driveways, and the sidewalk is wide and made from fancy brick.  And there are speed bumps along the two-football-field stretch of road that runs in front of the place, a place that could be picked up and transplanted in Beverly Hills and would feel right at home with its neighbors.

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At the bottom of a small hill on Bole Road, a couple of boys–street kids–wearing dirty rags for clothes, play in the mud puddles of an undeveloped piece of land after a hard rain.  They’re having a good time, laughing while sliding on their butts in the mud. 

Some were washing a minibus that transports people around the city.  The driver parked the bus in the runoff, and the boys used the brown water to clean the bus, earning a few Birr for their labor.

By a cinder block wall are little mounds of what appear to be trash, plastic sheets covering whatever might be underneath.  That is where they sleep, homeless kids with “homes” on the street.   

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If you were to stand inside the parents’ house and look out from one of the windows, there’s a good chance you could see the boys crawling into their homes at night.